


This Fic is Offensive, Do Not Read

by lexyhamilton (ohheichoumyheichou)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Child Abuse, Concentration Camps, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Genocide, Holocaust, M/M, Power Imbalance, Racism, Stockholm Syndrome, World War II, poorly researched historical fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2019-04-04 00:17:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14007969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohheichoumyheichou/pseuds/lexyhamilton
Summary: A concentration camp inmate catches the eye of an SS officer.





	1. 1942

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is something I wrote in 2006 in the throes of early 20s depression. Please don't read if you find the themes offensive. This is a blanket disclaimer that this fic, while somewhat researched, is probably not historically feasible, let alone accurate. Any resemblance to persons living, deceased, etc is not only coincidental but likely impossible. 
> 
> The Holocaust was a real event, a tragedy, and this is just a weird reimagined AU garbage riff on it that I wrote for some kind of therapeutic outlet. Read at your own risk.
> 
> The biggest warning of all: Unbetaed.

“I can see you trembling, you know.”

Officer Kuester’s boots pace up to bare feet and clicked to stop.

“I assume you know what you’re here for.”

Eyes flee to the side, tendons in the youth’s neck visibly shifting as he swallows.

“Well, if you’re not going to talk, you’d better get down to stripping.”

The youth continues to stand motionless, starting violently when the man hits the belt he had undone against the desk, only inches away from the recalcitrant body.

“Don’t play deaf, Isidor Schtern.” Unmasked surprise in the eyes already enlarged by emaciation. “I know German is your mother tongue. Your number is on file with us, and I took great care in remembering yours last night. We’ve had many boys brought in here to ease our boredom and frustration, and girls too—before they began shipping them off immediately. But you—you’re the first to grab my attention so singularly that I want to try you again, alone. Not a distinction you seem to value, I’m afraid.”

Officer Kuester is growing impatient with the youth’s lack of response. Though he didn’t expect much in the way of conversation, it’s another thing he’s starved for, with perhaps more urgency. None of the other SS officers under him dare speak something other than business, all young and educated differently than him, in any case. They respect him, but socialize only amongst themselves.

“Abstreife!”

Isidor’s knees knock into each other but he takes off the dirty coarse uniform he has been issued only days ago when he arrived in the camp. It still bears the feel of something that another person died in.

“Do you speak, for God’s sake? Perhaps you’d like to know what we have in our records about you. Isidor Schtern, born 1926, May 27th, black hair, blue eyes—yes, strikingly blue—1 meter, 75. This seems a bit outdated—I’d venture to guess 1’85 if you were to stand up straight. Tall for a Jew, really. Taller than me already, and probably still growing. Amazing how your generation seems to have sprouted up. What ration were you on at Warsaw? You lived there since you were… ten. Six years! A true product of the system. So what rations were you on? I can’t imagine it was very much, from what I’ve heard. Or were you part of one of those rich Jew families that preyed on their fellow inmates through shrewd dealings?”

“No,” Isidor answers forcefully, then quickly shrinks back, regretting breaking his silence.

“I didn’t think so, really, by the looks of that body. And a perspicacious Jew in your position would not only answer me but try to haggle over the price of such services as you’re about to provide.”

“I don’t know what Jews you’ve seen, but I’ve never met them. The ones I look up to would spit in your face.”

“But you haven’t the courage?” Kuester smiles but the coldness of his stare doesn’t shift. “I suppose the courage to tell an officer such a thing is a start. A militant Jew I have here, then?”

“No.” The boy’s eyes still avoid the man’s gaze. “I fear for my life. Willing to compromise my integrity over it, obviously.”

“Interesting. Well, turn against that table. I’ll put some music on, but you’d still better keep your mouth shut.”

The body, emaciated, with the slightly clumsy look characteristic of teen years is trembling all over. Nudity often exposes fear. Kuester runs a hand between the shoulder blades, following the line of protruding vertebrae.

“Yes, very small rations, if your body is any indication. And you get two slices of bread and a pat of butter here, which is probably worse than you’ve had. You know, growing boys your age suffer the most in crises like these. Nearly seventeen now? A very pretty face, but your thighs are narrower than your knee joints. You must not have much of a sexual drive, I imagine, but I’ll be gentle.”

Two strong hands gripped the hips, mouth descending on the neck where fear pulsated in quick thumps. 

“Have this for a bit,” Kuester says, pushing in a wedge of lard, watching the body before him squirm in discomfort. This body, which meant almost nothing when outside with all the masses, milling to and fro between the barracks, but here, stripped, in his office, still almost animal in its muteness—this body is suddenly very important, each breath it respires, each muscle that quivers under the duress and mental anguish, yes, anguish, worries, fears, dreams, complex thoughts generating in this pile of blood and tissue, labeled, recorded, distilled to one line of text and numbers in a chart of thousands of others like it.

“Your fear makes you hot,” he whispers into the boy’s ear, finger working the softened warm lard around on the surrounding area. “Now, don’t cry onto the wood, or the salt will eat right through the polish. This desk is the only furnishing worth anything in this room.”

The record is old and scratchy, distorting the deep woman’s voice it’s churning out.

Jew flesh—it’s been the only kind he’d had in a long time. Was he acquiring a special taste for it? Thin, resigned, just a little dirty and sickly. Schtern is all of them at once, but it doesn’t seem to detract from certain charms he possesses. He stands stoically silent, almost inanimate, only his body betraying him with a little shuddering at the pain. A special taste—it’s probably pathological, but what could he do, assigned to Dachau, with no family to leave its premises for. His mother has been worrying. Rightly perhaps, because this boy feels more pleasurable than any of the young girls he had courted in his more carefree, younger days. 

***

Kartoffel. Wonderful, fried kartoffel. Fried, bathed, soaked in the goyim’s cursed lard, and so good and sinfully filling, like angel food, too good to be true, like food from childhood that tasted so pungent and memorable. Oh, I could eat this until the end of time, this warm, greasy, German kartoffel, forever and ever, knowing it would be a tragedy when the plate would suddenly be empty, knowing I should save some for tomorrow, or for my barrack mates, but no, I hardly know them, and they’d be too curious, and Oh God! This was good when your mouth was full of it all at once and you weren’t looking at the man who was staring at you, who had ruined you inside out for this pitiful, base food that turns you into the animal they expect you to be, but they… they wouldn’t be any different in the same situation. Fuck them, and fuck their delicious food and round rosy cheeks and unnatural appetites for flesh. And fuck him for watching me cry right into my bowl even as I’m eating it all up. I’m tired of not crying and I’m tired of pretending no hunger, because no one gives a damn around here about stoicism or dignity. Except me, and I’m tired of thinking that way, and I’d suck him off without a second thought, I’m sure, if only it got me more of this kartoffel that just ended, just ended, how could it end so quickly? Oh for only a little more, I’d do anything, because life might not be worth living with these humiliations, but kartoffel tastes good and I want to have it as long as I have left to live.

***

“You finished that off quickly. I can give you more.”

Isidor looks morosely into the plate. 

“I’ll give you more and expect nothing in return. Not even your goodwill since I can see that it’s not an easy purchase. More?”

“No,” the boy says firmly, in disbelief at his own stubbornness. He runs the fork idly through the film of grease on the plate, not daring to lick it clean when the man is watching him.

“Something else, then? You can leave, but just know I’ll expect you here again, many times, as long as you’re here in the camp, standing on both feet. However glum and silent you are, your charms are compelling. I’ll put you down for grave digging work. A most secure post—don’t glare at me as if I’m doing you a disservice! You know very little about how to navigate your way through the system. When you know the system, you can survive.”

“Survive, die. The rumor goes we’re all shipped off to death camps in the end. There’s even talk of gassings and huge furnaces.”

“So you’ve heard rumors. You should also have heard that the industry of death is the last to be shipped off, the last to die, stands the best chance of going right through. Better be a part of it than a victim.”

“I won’t help dig graves for my own people.”

“You’d rather someone dig yours.”

“If it comes to that.”

“Your face makes me overestimate your wisdom then. At sixteen you can’t be blamed for imprudence, I suppose, but you’ll see I’m right if you live long enough. Consider yourself on the digging crew.”

Anger darkens Isidor’s features but he says nothing.

“Head back. It’s late, and you all get woken before dawn. I’ll send a guard to take you back to your barrack. And don’t do anything stupid. The guards here are trigger-happy, and they won’t hesitate to waste such a person as you, however I instruct them. Behave yourself and you’ll see me again in a day or two. And some good food if you please me like today.”

***

My barrack inmates are still staring at me, still all cowering since the guard kicked the door open in the middle of the night in order to push me inside. I’m a martyr, they might be thinking, but my pain is nothing to the pleasure of all that warm food in my stomach, and I feel great guilt, lying here on this filthy straw bunk-shelf, shoulder to shoulder with the others, like some sorry merchandise no one would look at. It stinks, but I breathe only through my nose, afraid that they can smell the lard on me, because I can still smell it, so peculiar, and I can still feel its residue inside me though I used the dirty old handkerchief he handed me to clean myself up. Used like a woman, again. The first time, when we had all just arrived, it had terrified me, when there were four of us and nine of them, all in a room. I had heard stories about it happening, but not like that. I hadn’t seen the other three since then—must be in barracks far away. One of the boys must have been no older than thirteen, and he shrieked so much they hit him with the blunt end of a pistol, and still used him, unconscious. And Meyer… Meyer separated away as soon as we arrived. I feel tears, but the pain in my body actually helps divert attention away. I’m crying because of my pain, not for Meyer. I’ll find him again, especially if I can ask for some help.

***

This day it’s white bread, a little coarse and moldy but better than what Isidor gets as an inmate, and the can of sardinen. And to drink, a little lime juice in the water, for less bruising, Kuester says, when he sees his blue fingerprints still on Isidor’s hips from the day before. Isidor can’t concentrate on the food as much, however, when he keeps trying to bring up the courage to ask what has been troubling him.

“M…my brother was separated from me when we arrived here…” he stutters out, finally deciding on a random moment and almost stopping when he sees that he has interrupted Officer Kuester from lighting a cigarette. “And… and I’d like to find him. They pushed him into one of the other lines, much as I protested.”

“Which of the three?”

“I couldn’t see.”

“How old was he?”

“Eleven. Meyer Schtern. He’s in good health.”

“Eleven is too young for this camp. He was probably sent right off with the women.”

“Sent… off? He’s not in this camp at all?”

Kuester takes a drag from the cigarette, looking away. “I can check for his records, but I only have lists for people who stayed here. There are lists of people were deported onward elsewhere, and I can check those too. If you like.”

“Of course I would like.” Isidor’s voice is breaking up again. He goes back to the can of sardinen, trying to chase away thoughts of the worst.

“Your hair…” Kuester’s voice breaks the uneasy silence. “When it grows out, is it straight or in curls?”

“Light curls,” Isidor hurries to answer, then quickly realizes it had been boorish to speak with a mouth full of food.

“How biblical. You know, for all the talk about returning to purity of blood, I always wondered about the Jews. I was growing up Roman-Catholic, you see, and I always wondered about how such a small race could sustain itself through all these centuries. I even learned a little of the Biblical tongue along with my Greek and Latin, back in school. A lower race you are, perhaps, but, unto yourselves, you are largely untainted. Now, ‘Isidor,’ that’s a popular name among you, but it’s Greek in origin. You have a Hebrew name that is similar, do you not?”

Isidor lowers his head, evidently reluctant to divulge. “Izaak.”

“Izaak… do you know what it means in your ancient tongue?”

“No. I don’t know Hebrew.”

“It has to do with laughter. A happy name. Are you a happy boy, Izaak?”

“Don’t call me that. I’ve never used it.”

“No ceremony of thirteen?”

Isidor looks up with mild surprise. “Yes, well, only there.”

“How was it, in Warsaw, to become a man inside a fence?”

“The same as anywhere, I guess.”

Kuester laughs. Laughs at the absurdity of it all—boys growing into men, only to be cut down later. Human life being natural and unruly, like grass sprouting out of the pavement. Only to be cut down later. He is feeding a corpse in the making—food, hope, a semblance of a relationship—all to be dumped into a mass grave soon. “And Meyer… a name to do with light, disguised as a German word. Clever, your ability to chameleonize but not intermix. Besides your brother, you’re all alone?”

Isidor gets up and walks toward the door, not even having finished the whole can.

“Early rise tomorrow,” he says with less apology than tension. Kuester gives him a strange look but calls a guard in without another word.

***

Lying on the small couch in his office, my naked skin scratched by the coarse upholstery, and he’s on top of me, kissing me, running his hands over my body, practically consoling me, and I can’t even think about the news he just told me—can’t devote my mind to thinking about Meyer and how he must have died, and instead of being angry at the bearer of bad news I want him to touch me all over, to numb the pain and fear with body contact, because I really don’t want to think about Meyer’s body in a pile like the ones I now help bury here, off somewhere far across the country, shot at close range with women and mewling babies and small children and old people, and not even a mother to clutch him to herself. Because that’s how it happens—I get to see it done now, to the ones who are so weak they can’t even be transported. I don’t shoot them myself, but I stand and see it—watch it, even—though it makes me feel ill, and I live securely by digging holes to put those bodies in, and the sight of death doesn’t even frighten me, just numbs me—numbs me and I want to be numb again. Especially now.

So he’s concerned because I burst into tears so openly in front of him when he told me what he had found out, and he thinks it’s that traumatic for me, but really it’s not, I’m just crying selfishly, wanting attention, because I’d really given up on Meyer as soon as he told me he was probably shipped off to Auschwitz, though hearing it made it worse, made me feel pain all over and I want to live more than ever, and I see that working on the digging crews at Dachau is best suddenly, and I’m so glad he signed me up, because most people I came with have already been shipped off onwards, or die of the typhus that’s going around like wildfire, but we are needed and we need to be healthy, to bury all those people, so we sleep in separate barracks. I’m needed there, and I’m needed here, but he hasn’t even done anything yet, which is unusual because he always started with little ado, but I must have frightened him with my bawling and he wants to wait until I calm down, but I’m not going to, dammit, because he shouldn’t have told me before he used me, and now I want this relaxation to go on forever, to just unwind all the way, everything that’s gotten wound up ever since Warsaw, and I feel such attachment to him—no wonder, when I just found out I’m all alone in this world now, and when they keep us from developing friendships with other inmates with their clever tactics of barking at anyone who dares talk to each other outside and mixing up our sleeping places in those filthy barracks every single night. Of course I’ll turn to him, with no other options, and it’s all artificial, but I can’t help it and don’t want to help it, because fighting for dignity will only make you suffer, and I don't have any real dignity, and I don’t care what he does, as long as he cares, and devotes so many thoughts to me.

And then he tells me to get dressed again. Did I miss him doing it? No amount of distraction could have made me miss it, unless I’m losing my mind, but of course I obey with only a little hesitation, and he gives me bratwurst, and asks me if I’ve ever had it, and of course I haven’t but I eat it up just the same, and he apologizes for not having any condiments, and I’m still thinking about when the hell he’s going to do it already, but I won’t remind him, and I finish, almost satisfied, full of the goyim’s meat and feeling unusually energetic even as Meyer’s corpse is lying in a ditch somewhere, and I’m frantic to pay for my food already, to martyr my body, but Kuester only calls a guard in to take me back, and suddenly I tremble at the thought that I might never come back here, that he’s disgusted by my behavior, that the visits and the privileges are over. Because these visits are almost a respite from life in the camp, not the torture they’re supposed to be. What he does to me inside this room is neither the most humiliating nor the most painful thing I’ve been subjected to since the move to Warsaw, really, and it’s one of the few times when I don’t have to worry about being shot for a wrong move. I want to turn back and at least suck him off, to make me feel less guilty and secure my place with him, but I can’t and just walk back quietly, the guard pushing me along if I start walking too slowly for his liking.

***

“I’m glad, you know.”

“About what?”

“About being here again. I thought you grew tired of me last time.”

“You had to absorb bad news. Quite psychologically predictable, and I didn’t want to have you in that mood.”

“It’ll be different today, I promise.”

Isidor’s head is hard to grab with hair only just growing back. Kuester is disciplining himself not to thrust. The boy is still inexperienced, and the last thing he wants is to choke him. Back and forth, back and forth—it isn’t quite the pace he would have liked, but he can’t move the head himself…

“Beschleunigen Sie…” It comes out as a groan, especially when the boy obeys without hesitation and accelerates twofold. It’s obedience of an almost fanatic fervor, something Kuester had not expected though he prides himself on his ability to mold people. This boy… this adoration… it’s less loving than desperate—a strange mix of self-preservation instinct and fear of loneliness. That’s all it is, Kuester manages to conclude just before orgasm hits him.

Two more that night, to the point of it being exhausting. They lie beside each other on the prickly couch, hardly enough room for two, but Isidor is on his bony side, staring at the man beside him—hardly an SS officer when his uniform is somewhere on the floor, thrown off with uncharacteristic carelessness, probably wrinkled. Isidor suddenly makes bold to try and kiss, only to be shoved to the floor. 

“Not with that mouth you’re not,” Kuester says sharply, not knowing what had disturbed him so much about the action.

Isidor trembles and runs the back of his hand along his lips, fearing there had been foul material still left on them. A pretty mouth, but a Jew mouth, a little bruised, good at sucking like some bottom-dwelling fish scavenger.

“Why do you do all this?” Kuester finally asked. “You don’t enjoy a moment of it yourself, it’s plain enough. Do I finally see the famed seductive powers of a Jew?”

Isidor only stares back with round eyes, head craning downward in fear.

“What do you want? Food? I’ll give you some whether you whore yourself or not. I’ll use you as I like, so don’t worry about goading me.”

“I-I’m not whoring myself.” Isidor swallowed hard. “I want to repay you for your kindness.”

“Kindness? Kindness is for the weak. I treat every person as they earn it, and don’t you forget who’s in charge in this room. Leave your payments and repayments for your usurer brothers.”

Isidor stares back dumbly, before standing up to get dressed, surprised when Kuester grabs him and pulls him into his lap. It’s ridiculous. Isidor is taller than the man sitting directly behind him, but Kuester doesn’t seem concerned. His hand snakes forward to lock around.

“Well-formed for a sixteen-year old raised in such minimal comforts. Are you really too undernourished to enjoy anything? How does man perform under prolonged distress, shall we see?”

Kuester’s other arm secures the bony torso against his own, though Isidor makes no resistance as it is. The clock ticks, lungs fill and empty, heartbeats thump one against the other pressed against it. Back and forth, back and forth the hand goes all the while. 

“We should have tried it with some oil…” Kuester finally surrenders, withdrawing his hand but brings it back on cue of an almost inaudible “Please don’t stop.” Though the buildup had been slow, Isidor’s body gathers speed and comes like any healthy sixteen year old’s after only a little more attention. Tears come in a flood, but he quickly wipes them away, trying so hard not to annoy this night.

“Ever done this before for yourself?” Kuester whispers into his ear when he feels the body cease shaking.

“Rarely. We all lived in one room in the ghetto. It was crowded everywhere. They always keep us crowded.”

“’They’?” Silence. “I’m very much part of the ‘they,’ Schtern. I’m amazed you don’t hate the sight of me, frankly.”

Isidor sighs. “I’d like to. I’d really like to, and would feel pure inside if I did, but I have no one else, and the truth is—the truth is—I want to stay in this room and never come out of it again...”

Kuester pushes him off his lap, and the youth begins dressing.

“Listen, Schtern, don’t think that when you’re shipped off I won’t get another one like you. I’ll find someone among them all.”

“I know.”

“And don’t think I care about your petty life and its problems when we have swarms coming through this camp. Don’t think yourself above them.”

“I don’t. I’m below them all.”

“Don’t flatter yourself with individualism. A Jew is a Jew, no matter what he does or where he goes. Now, your face saves you. Thank your face that you’re still alive.”

Isidor was tensing to avoid tears again. “I know. I know all that.”

“Know everything, do you. Good, sit down to eat, then.”

“I’d rather not.” Isidor walked towards the door.

“Sit down and eat. I don’t need your pretenses.”

“I’d rather not. I served you already, let me go.”

“You overestimate how much choice you have. If you don’t sit down and eat I’ll put a bullet in your head myself.”

***

Why does it have to be this way… why do I have nobody I can turn to… didn’t I please him today, enough for him not to say the things I already knew? No, I didn’t know. He could have fooled me with looking up Meyer’s information within three days of my asking. Jewish scum, Jewish scum… that’s what we are, but they distinguish between us and keep track of how many of us, how much we possess, where from, and where to. And he’s the same as them all, completely the same, and I don’t know why I thought any differently, unless I’m a dog who follows around anyone who will feed me with one hand and beat me with the other, which I am, I am because I already feel my resentment toward him melting a little bit when I eat this sandwich with cheese and egg, even though he forces me to eat it, after I put on that unconvincing show of wanting to refuse, because I’m a false person, a low person, a person of no principles, quite old enough to be a man, but acting worse than a child.

***

It is ludicrous to bring out his best pair of boots for the occasion. It is also ludicrous to see an emaciated nude like Isidor pulling them on without having to unfasten them along the seam in the back, walking around the room awkwardly at their owner’s behest, legs frighteningly thin when surrounded by an opening meant to accommodate healthy manly calves. Tap, tap, tap they ring out each time they hit the floor, but the gait is unsure, anxious, so that even with closed eyes Kuester can hear the Jewish quality in his guest.

He takes Isidor face to face on that ratty little couch, the boots reflecting the light from the naked lightbulb above them casting ever unflattering light on the proceedings. Kuester switches it off and is please that he can still see Isidor in the moonlight from the window. The boots are blacker than the darkness except where they reflect. Isidor throws his legs up in the air, looking not so much wanton as obedient. Officer Kuester moves in and feels their hard heels dig in into the small of his back. He finishes quickly, as he always does, but this boy won’t whine complaints about it like those of the potential daughters-in-law his mother kept seeking out for him before he began living here.

He lingers inside the youth, running his fingers through hair slowly growing back, but they do not kiss. Though they lie in the most intimate of embraces, joining mouths still seems not only awkward but repulsive.

Isidor’s eyes stray to the side nervously. He begins to move his lower body again.

“Don’t try. It won’t rise again this quickly. Still lieg.”

He feels the body under him go limp but the boots remain locked at the small of his back. They are pressed together bare abdomen to bare abdomen and Kuester feels more than hears a plaintive gurgle from his makeshift lover’s guts.

“Shall I let you go eat?”

He watches for the nervous swallow that shifts the tendons in Isidor’s neck and is satisfied that he knows so many idiosyncrasies in the boy. The study is like a hobby.

“Well?”

“Whatever you’d like.”

Kuester wouldn’t like to kiss him, but he does, deeply, perhaps longer than he has ever kissed anyone. Isidor’s body convulses around him, the heels dig in as if trying to pull him further in and arousal suddenly makes a hint of returning.

***

And so my first real kiss. I remember Father kissing Mother, as if they did it more frequently after we were put in the ghetto, but probably only because we had less privacy. And I feel sick, suddenly, because this is not whom they would have ever thought I’d be kissing, and I shouldn’t be kissing him, and I almost want to retch but how could I dare. And it wouldn’t be fair, in a way, because it’s not him I’m retching at, but just the entire course of my life, and I shudder to think what’s ahead, there’s nothing, not even gloom, just nothing, blankness, as it doesn’t matter what happens and yet I’m deathly afraid of it. My body shudders at the thought and then he’s growing inside me again. Again. I don’t even mind. What’s one more time, one fewer times. It’s all beginning to blend, and I grasp on to him as if he’s the only stable thing, when really he’s the most confusing of all.

***

Officer Kuester looks over the morning reports, signs lists of names deported, imported, killed on the premises, dead of illness or malnutrition, all of them too long, too tedious to read, but he scans, supremely tired until he notices Schtern listed as a transfer to the authority of Dr. Brandt.

He leaves the papers in two orderly stacks, puts on his longcoat and strides out and across the camp over to the research hospital. Is he walking more quickly than his usual gait? He slows for decorum’s sake as he nears the imposing medical building corpus. He has rarely been seen here and the junior officers salute him with extra vigor before escorting him to the doctor’s office.

They hail each other not only because of regulations, but they truly do not know each other well for being men of comparable rank in the same camp. Karl Brandt is nearing his forties, dark-haired, with a face that would be more handsome if he weren’t always so grim.

“The sample you took yesterday… there is one in there I need back.”

“Need him for what?”

“He’s young and healthy and digs ditches faster than anyone else.”

“Get two to replace him. I need healthy subjects. If all goes well, he’ll go back to work soon enough.”

“I can count on my fingers the number you’ve ever sent back to work. Just give me this one back.”

“A cure for malaria is less noble a cause than digging a ditch nowadays? Don’t let war turn your head, Kuester.”

“I turn my head where I please, and it pleases me to take this one back to my side of the camp.”

“A troublesome man, you are,” Brandt mutters as he instructs a subordinate to show Kuester to where the human cattle is held.

Kuester walks into the room disgusted. The heavy smell of urine and sweat and bodies, many bodies, each endowed with sorrowful eyes with which to stare at him. He spots Isidor in their midst and only a slight nod of the head is enough to make the boy stand up and walk towards the door. He’s wise enough not to make any contact or even speak. They leave and the door shuts behind him. Karl Brandt has arrived as well and Isidor stands obedient and motionless even when Brandt examines his face by .

“Looks like middling jüdische Schweine to me. Is this really worth crossing camp for?”

“Nothing special. Just for amusement in my spare time.”

“Digging ditches for your amusement, no doubt.”

“How ever did you guess.”

The two men stand at odds and Isidor is so still, so pale that he recedes into the background like a marble column.

“I would perhaps like to see him dig ditches. Tonight, shall we say?”

“If I’m not too busy.”

“Likewise.”

***

I can feel myself shaking and I’d like to stop, I don’t even know why I’m shaking, why shake even if I had been close to death? But no, just the name of Karl Brandt makes me shake, because death would be so painful in his hands, and I was so afraid when I was in that crowded room of others that I even prayed to a god I don’t believe in.

We all knew what awaited us, if not the details, then the general flavor. And, god, God! How terrified we all were and I was saved, as if in some fairytale, though the others may have thought a worse fate awaits me, but no, nothing is worse. Nothing is worse, I keep telling myself, and yet I’ll be returned to Brandt. Kuester hasn’t spoken to me at all, but he didn’t let me go back to work, just kept me in his office all day and it felt strange to do absolutely nothing for so long.

And now he’s returned, and he still doesn’t speak, just takes me without a word, and he’s angry and rough, and I don’t know if it’s at me, but I don’t think so, and I wouldn’t say anything in either case, and just grit my teeth and bear it, because this is still better than where I’m going to be in less than an hour now, oh God.

I fall to my knees, like a little child who doesn’t want to go, and he hoists me back up and slaps my face, but it’s not as malicious as I think it is at first. He just wants to wake me up out of this feeling. I feel him squeeze my nose. I’ve been crying silently on and off all day, and my nose is dirty, so he brings me over to the sink in the water closet of his office and lowers my head almost right into it, turns the metal knob with a groan and rubs the stream of chilly water into my face.

***

“Hab keine Angst,” Kuester mutters, running his hand over the bony back bent over the low sink.

Isidor dresses and they proceed together. The hospital is ostensibly closed, but they go in through a side entrance. Isidor is surprised when Kuester sits down, even as Brandt undoes his belt. So surprised and distracted that he is caught completely off guard by the leather belt snapping across his thighs even before the command to undress is barked out. He is turned around and anchors himself against a table. Brandt is a true doctor and examines everything before he makes use of it.

“Frolicked right before coming here, Kuester? And without a barrier either. You surprise me.”

“He was only had by the men in my regiment once and ever since exclusive to me.”

“But amongst themselves, the Juden. They will have unusually high appetites, I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

“Not in my experience.”

“They are rather sexless at this stage of starvation, aren’t they...” Brandt snaps on a blue rubber barrier and pushes in without any ceremony. Isidor’s knees shake but he makes no sound. Good boy, Kuester thinks, his feelings of irritation rising with every moment passed in this room.

Brandt takes a long time, finally pulling out, daintily picking off the rubber and disposing of it. 

“Not much of interest that I can discern, Kuester.”

“Then I apologize from the bottom of my heart.”

Brandt takes an almost empty bottle of vodka out of a drawer and finishes it off quickly. Isidor has just relaxed, about to straighten up when Brandt takes him by the middle and begins inserting the bottle into him, bottom-first. Isidor chokes his own scream and though he has been avoiding looking at Kuester ever since he stripped, he now looks over desperately. Kuester sits impassive, watching the rounded glass vessel disappearing until only the neck is protruding. Drops of cold sweat pepper the wood under Isidor’s face.

Brandt releases his hold and steps away admiring his work. “Hold it in, jüdische Schweine. Only the outrageous can be satisfying with their kind.” 

Isidor trembles all over, burning pain emanating from its epicenter. He collapses to his elbows as he feels the glass begin to slip out, concentrating in efforts to retain it, not wanting to find out what the consequences of dropping it would turn out to be.

“Alright, Brandt, early rise tomorrow.” Kuester leaves his motionless post, seizing the bottle by the neck. Isidor winces, anticipating a yank that never comes. Kuester’s hand alights on his stomach, pressing, coaxing the body to expel on its own.

Brandt lights a cigar and pretends he isn’t watching.

***

This day never seems to end. He brought me back not to the barracks but to his office, even though my walking was so pained and slow, and as soon as we arrived pushed me into his shower—he’d often make me shower before doing anything else, but never did I get water so hot that it was steaming, cleansing, as if Brandt is an oily smear that can be erased. The stream is too narrow, and some part of my body is always exposed and cold, but I could stand here forever. I wash myself in the intimate places even though he’s watching me, or perhaps because he’s watching me, since I’m sure he didn’t want me to just stand here basking in the heat.

He dries me off with a big towel—his own towel, I think, here for when he cannot afford to leave camp for days on end. I sit in his lap like an overgrown child, wrapped in the towel. I sat like this with my mother when I was very little. He reaches for my crotch and God is it good to feel his hand there and I even thrust feebly, though my body still hurts so much.

He wipes his hand on the towel once I finish into his palm and kisses me hard, almost painfully, all over, in countless places, and I can see light bruises spring up on my arms, and he lays me down on the couch, the towel under me shielding my skin from the prickles. He spreads my legs and there is a jolt of pain. I feel panic that we’re about to do it when my body is anything but ready, but he leans down and sucks on me, and I’m so surprised I cry out. He stops and turns me over, and I’m uncomfortable, frankly, feeling excitement so stifled. He’s parting my cheeks, and oh! Oh! But you cannot do that, and I even blurt out and tell him so, but he only echoes Brandt about doing the outrageous with my kind, and his tongue is back, caressing the soreness away it seems, and I am very glad I washed thoroughly. I cannot even enjoy it, because worries about what I’d have to do to repay him for this fill my mind, but my body responds even when I’m absent-minded, and I come to realize I’m spreading myself even further, even though it hurts to do it, just because of the wonderful shivers that come with his tongue following from the front all the way to the back. Maybe Brandt was right about us having unusual levels of appetite, because I don’t know what’s usual anymore, corpses in my job are usual and so is going to this room once a week or so and doing godknowswhat with a man, a man who is partly responsible for much of the horrible things in my life, and perhaps I should be ashamed, but I don’t have the time or presence of mind to be. Not now.


	2. 1943-1947

_May, 1943_

Kuester feels irritation as he drives up to camp—irritation that he’s inadvertently grown dependent on a worthless little youth who might be dead by now for all he knows. He refuses to pump on the gas pedal. It’s bad enough that he’d cut his holiday month a few days short, simply because it was getting unbearable. His mother was right to be worried, of course, because though there was nothing unusual about taking sexual pleasure from the Jews, he seemed inclined to do it to the exclusion of every other form of intimacy. Every night thoughts of that wasted boy before falling asleep inspired more longing than all the daytime half-hearted flirting and teasipping he had done with good German girls at his mother’s behest. 

Briefed in his office, realizing how much work had been neglected in his absence, Kuester vows to refrain from inviting Isidor today, annoyed that he is fairly sure he won’t keep to his resolution.

***

I hear them opening the gates and try to see who’s coming without drawing attention to myself. It’s his car, long and black with that impeccable polished look about it. And what does that mean to me? Nothing much, probably, only my stomach making a small noise, just his appearance makes my hunger more acute, and it’s harder to concentrate because I’m remembering the feeling of his food in my mouth, and large rough hands gripping me wherever he pleases. I try to return to work—I know I won’t be brought in to him until after curfew, oh but it’s unbearable, and I have to bend over because my stomach is panging as if I’d been kicked there.

Time passes, it’s already the afternoon, and we suddenly get barked at to line up, and I see that Kuester has driven back out to us, come to review our progress on the rail tracks in person. We make eye-contact only very briefly, and I catch myself about to smile even as I turn my head to face forward again, because I missed him these four weeks, I missed him, but things would be better now that he was returned. He’d bring back order. Too long in assembling he snaps at us. One man is still walking over to get into formation, I don’t know his name, but I’ve seen him working here with me sometimes, and everyone looks over at him, he was working furthest out from us, but he’s walking slowly, without hurry, even though it’s a senior official visiting. He was slow but it’s so sudden, so bewilderingly cruel, when he has joined us, Kuester just pulls out his handgun and shoots him in the face, shoots at such close range that I see the people standing nearby get spattered with red, and we all crane our heads, looking down at the ground even before his body has time to crumple and fall onto the gravel. We hear the sound of Kuester’s polished boots crunching the gravel and dare not move or look up.

He talks about how he sees that his subordinates have been lax with us and that we should be worth our rations, work hard and listen to orders, and how there should have been five hundred more meters of track by now, and I stand there, trying to listen to him carefully, but I can’t, guilt filling my mind at how happily I’d been looking forward to his return and here a man I knew was lying dead, making a puddle of blood.

He’s finished his short lecture and walks away, dressed so smartly it’s frightening, and the man in charge of us is flustered and yells at us to get back to work, and we all jump to it without thinking, and I already feel myself softening to what I just witnessed, the promise of food outweighing any outrage I should have. And not only the food—I don’t want to remember this and think he’s a monster of a man, I want to pretend I saw none of it, because I want to give my body without the hesitation, the reluctant hatred that I’ll now have toward if he calls me tonight.

I try to forget it, concentrating on hammering in the bolts well, and I know I’ve succeeded in forgetting when the painful hunger has returned.

***

“Did you miss the food?”

Isidor looks at him—looks up through his black lashes because he’s folded himself up to be shorter, even though Kuester can swear he’s grown even taller since he last saw him. A cautious nod. Kuester is almost tempted to smile. He pulls Isidor closer but only for a moment.

“You smell of piss.”

Isidor steps back, but his voice is less subservient than his posture. “Only like the straw in the barracks. They never change it.”

“I’ll give the orders tomorrow then. Go and wash off all that filth.”

Isidor wonders if he’s been missed as he stands naked under the stream of water. Kuester watches him but says nothing, does nothing, only orders him to wash his clothing in the sink as well. No matter. It’s ecstasy to feel clean water on his skin. Isidor looks at himself in the small rust-splotched shaving mirror over the sink and realizes he looks more worn out than he remembers himself looking last time he was here. He leans down again, biting his lips to summon some color back, the realization that his face is his livelihood making him shiver. He’d slap rose color back to his cheeks if Kuester weren’t watching.

“You have to wring them out with more force,” Kuester’s voice is suddenly right near his ear, and Isidor surrenders his soaked clothes to the powerful arms that come around his body on either side. Large hands squeeze and turn, water dripping out, water still dripping from Isidor as well, making a small puddle around him on the linoleum, one solitary drop running down his forehead and stopping indecisive at the tip of his nose.

Kuester lets the clothing flop into the sink, wet hands migrating over to Isidor’s torso. Isidor feels a tongue run a small wet trail on his head, hair so short that it’s practically the scalp Kuester is licking. Isidor wonders if Kuester can feel the tremble that passes through him. He looks in the mirror and sees that the color has rushed back to his flustered cheeks of its own accord.

“I craved your body all month,” Kuester says right next to Isidor’s ear—breathes more than says. Exquisitely dutiful, Isidor arches, arms anchoring against the edge of the sink, legs opening to give him purchase and Kuester access. Kuester laughs. “You don’t think I can wait until we return to the couch?”

Isidor doesn’t say that he thinks the couch is prickly and uncomfortable. He doesn’t say his knees burn from rubbing against the upholstery as he moves his body up and down while Kuester simply lies there, not even undressed, only unbuttoned, judging eyes fixed on him. Kuester’s body tenses only briefly and he pulls Isidor down so that they lie chest to chest, Isidor aware of how cold his body is when his skin touches the chest moist with sweat peeking out of the undone shirt. Kuester’s hand squeezes the boy’s rear, strokes his thigh, kneads the withering body with all its bones barely hidden away, worse after his long absence. Isidor wonders if he should be embarrassed about how he’s changed. Kuester wonders about what would eventually happen were he to heed his mother’s entreaties to quit working in a place that prevented him from going home often.

How long would this pitiful boy last?

“Du bist ein guter Fick.”

Isidor doesn’t reply. Flinches ever so slightly at the uncharacteristically vulgar word, Kuester notes, but doesn’t reply.

***

A good lay. He wants me to be hurt? I don’t care. I never had any illusions about what I am to him. What does he expect me to say? A cold-blooded murderer’s tender affections are no worthy ambition.

Though it does hurt me-- but only because I’m still cold and hungry, because really all I need from him is some hot food, but he’s still holding me tight, lazy bastard, longer and longer we just lie around after sex each time, and I’m tired of it, frankly, but he’s just babbling on about how he hated going out to his mother’s and how she nags him and introduces him to girls she thinks are nice. Telling me this? Why? I saw my mother get sick and die when I was thirteen, and he wants me to listen to his woes? I don’t care, and I wish he’d take himself out of me already, and I don’t know why I waited for him as if he was the sunlight in my life when he’s so selfish and ugly and sickening.

He tells me about the flowers he saw blooming in the fields on the drive back, as if I don’t know, as if I can’t look out across the wire fence and see the grass a little further out teeming with them.

***

“Are you bored with me, Isidor?”

The boy’s thoughts are interrupted by the sound of his name. 

“What do you know, a Jew bored by an SS officer. Or maybe not bored, but outright irritated?” He pushes Isidor upright again. “How inconsiderate of me, leaving you unfulfilled.”

Isidor shakes his head.

“Oh no, if you want to presume to be more than a good occasional fuck, you’ll have to show me you’re more than a mute bag of skin and bones to ladle food into.”

Isidor can’t. He rubs himself in desperate obedience but his body won’t cooperate. When he was fed a good meal regularly he was beginning to feel something like desire, but it’s all gone again and it’s impossible to summon anything more than feeble arousal.

“I can’t, I don’t even feel anything. My body’s not ready.”

“A shame,” Kuester says but grabs at the feeble erection himself, fist moving up and down with such force that Isidor wonders if he should voice his discomfort. He feels warmer, a sheen of sweat breaking out on his chest, though he’s incredibly thirsty. Orgasm is small and timid, oozing a few drops.

Kuester frowns. The strong fingers grasp Isidor’s lower jaw, turning his head to and fro. A thumb pulls away the lower lip, revealing the boy’s teeth, a finger pulls at the skin under the eye to examine for yellow tint. “I don’t like the look of you. Are you ill?”

“No, not at all, I feel fine, what makes you say that,” Isidor rattles off in a panic. 

Kuester pulls Isidor’s forehead to his lips, failing to detect a fever. “Don’t be afraid, I’m not the inspection committee.”

Dinner is exquisitely fresh—milk in a small glass bottle, thick, off-white, country bread not a day old, heavenly-sweet jam that conjures up memories from childhood, always followed closely by unbidden heavy sadness. Kuester gives Isidor a spoonful of something nasty from a bottle, vitamins his mother insisted he take, he tells Isidor, because it feels strange to say he went out and bought them, expressly for bringing them here.

Isidor eats everything with a certain sense of urgency, quickly enough that his stomach cramps with food so much in excess of his daily rations. He sits, growing progressively more pale, still naked because his clothing is not yet dry, finally running into the water closet, vomiting up everything, shaking dreadfully, feeling weaker than when he came through the door.

Kuester watches grimly as Isidor rinses out his mouth and cleans the seat and floor that he dirtied. “I’m afraid we had too many variables today to deduce what’s wrong with you. Milk… vitamins… sex with someone you despise.” Isidor looks back frantically, shaking his head. “Or simply the long hiatus. Or maybe you are ill after all?”

Kuester grab’s Isidor’s arm by force, pushes him into the other room with the shower, turns on frigid water, feels Isidor try to struggle out of it but keeps his arm put, sleeve getting wet as he holds the boy under the stream.

“It’s cold!” the boy whimpers but stops struggling when he doesn’t feel the grip on his arm loosen.

Kuester shuts the water off abruptly, and Isidor’s chattering teeth can be heard clearly. He gives Isidor bread which doesn’t seem to trigger nausea, then sits in his chair while Isidor pleasures him with his mouth. Kuester’s hand rests on the bare head working to and fro between his thighs, the boy’s face beginning to flush, and by the time the job is done Isidor has a discernable fever.

“I don’t know what you have, but your body wasn’t attempting to fight it before we shocked it. An unfortunately common occurrence in those with your lifestyle.” He pats Isidor’s cheek. The boy looks pained and confused, so used to hiding any symptoms of illness and exposed here against his will. His clothing is not yet dry, Kuester says, switching off the lonely light-bulb, laying him out on the couch, lying down next to him, watching Isidor’s tired eyes fall closed.

Isidor wakes up with a start at a knock on the door. The sun is already up—far past the wakeup call for the barracks. Why is he still here? Kuester’s arms are wrapped around him, he is naked, his throat is terribly sore, and his head is pounding. The knock repeats itself. Kuester opens his eyes without hurry and whispers to Isidor to retire himself into the water closet. Isidor stands beside the toilet, feeling dizzy but not sure whether he is allowed to sit down on it—though he had thrown up into it only yesterday, that had been an unfortunate emergency, after all—listening to Kuester opening the door and discussing something with someone briefly. The door closes again.

“I need to leave…” Isidor mumbles as he slinks out of his hiding place.

Kuester is sitting at his desk, buttoned up, spectacles on, not even looking up at him. “You’re doing special unspecified duties today, Schtern.”

Isidor feels naked and useless. “Does—“ he pauses, waiting for Kuester to look up at him but the man does not oblige. “Does that mean I’m staying here?”

“Yes, but stay in the shower room. I don’t need any distractions. And get dressed—you’ll make your cold worse.”

Isidor sits on the edge of the small sitting bath, but soon climbs in and surrenders to fatigue, knees folded, head leaning against the hard tile wall. It’s an uncomfortable sleep, full of awareness, and he hears people coming in and out of the office, and part of him is mortally afraid of someone opening the door to this small adjoining room, while the other part remembers Kuester’s serene confidence and he drifts back into uneasy sleep, voices and worries receding.

It’s already past seven o’clock when Kuester cracks open the door to the shower room, seeing his lover asleep in that pathetic position. He watches Isidor for a few moments before opening the door further, knowing it will creak, seeing Isidor jerk awake.

“Did you want…” Isidor asks, apprehensive of having to perform when he feels so ill he can hardly stand.

“To use the shower. There’s food for you out on the table, if your stomach can take it.”

Isidor eats the food slowly, cautious now. Kuester has dinner as well and Isidor realizes he has never seen the man eat, as if he were some immortal titan. Nothing else is done that night. Kuester sleeps next to Isidor chastely, even turned away, and Isidor catches himself wishing he could just be touched, shown that he matters.

***  
_June, 1944_

It’s in the middle of being roughly fucked into the couch that I realize Kuester hasn’t taken his early summer holiday this year. Things seem to be going poorly for their side, though he never talks to me about the war. He’s pleasant enough to me, and it’s really only in his thrusts that frustration and anger come through. I can pretend I don’t notice well enough and we always part satisfied. He still has me brought to his quarters at least twice a week, but speaks less nowadays, and demands that I entertain him with stories from my childhood, though I have few memorable things to relate and worry I’ll run out completely soon. But not taking summer holiday seems serious, and I’m suddenly insatiably curious about his world and his troubles. All I’ve been hearing are rumors from the others.

***

 

“Isidor,” Kuester says, seeing the boy is lost in other thoughts. “Why so quiet today? Tell me something.”

Isidor sighs, searches for words as he eats his toast. Toasting makes stale bread far more bearable, Kuester has discovered.

“Tell me about a time you got yourself into trouble and your parents punished you… Or were you a spoiled little Jewish brat who never got punished?”

Isidor glares, but knows it for the affectionate jab it is, and glares only because that’s the reaction Kuester expects from him. He begins to relate a story about making his younger brother stand on an anthill in a park and running away when the ants started biting him, still thinking about how to approach asking Kuester about the war.

They’re back on the couch, another round precipitating, Kuester kissing him greedily, frequent nourishment and force of habit in the last year or so making Isidor able to give the semblance of a response, embracing the man back, wrapping his legs around Kuester’s waist, like a real lover, Kuester contemplates, though he wonders how much of it is Jewish artifice.

“Where have the Allies advanced to?” Isidor says quickly as Kuester’s lips release his mouth and attack his neck.

Kuester pulls back abruptly, staring at Isidor’s increasingly apprehensive face. “Are you unhappy? Are you lacking in something?”

Isidor shakes his head no before he has time to think but it’s too late. He’s flopped over, stretched roughly, nominally, before being entered, the subsequent harsh thrusts moving him back and forth across the prickly couch, scratching his entire front. Isidor bears it without a sound, admittedly at fault, reminded all too clearly of the place he holds whatever affections he is shown when he behaves himself.

“I don’t care about the Allies, I only care about what’s making you lose sleep,” Isidor justifies himself when Kuester has finished and exited him abruptly.

“Don’t meddle, then.”

“I won’t.” Isidor turns around and moves himself closer to Kuester. Beguiling slut, Kuester thinks to himself, but his cold exterior thaws.

“If you really wish to stick your Jewish nose in my affairs, I can tell you things are going badly. Germany’s on the defensive on all fronts, and there’s plans to evacuate entire Polish camps and drive them inward. So we’ll be cramming many more of you miserables into this camp.”

Isidor is motionless, thoughts of liberation inadvertently running through his mind, petrifying him between anticipation and fear of what that would bring.

“And if they eventually reach us here, perhaps you’ll have to do something more useful with yourself than be a whore, Schtern.” Kuester is happy to see Isidor uncomfortable and tongue-tied.

***

When did I get so comfortable doing this base task? Liberation. The word begins to frighten me, and I want to cling to routine. Kuester is cruel sometimes, but I’m attached, dependent, and now I heartily regret ever asking. Will he cast me aside? Will he no longer be as gentle with me, thinking my heart is set on escaping him, when the more I think about it, the more uncertain I become about what would happen, and I’m disgusted with myself when I recall how the other inmates talk of these things, with unadulterated hope, whereas here I am, wavering, culling special favors from the same side that has deprived me of everything and reduced me to this in the first place, and despite all of this all I feel is desperation to prove my loyalty to him. 

Ich liebe Sie, I blurt the words out, sounding awkward, not even sure if I mean them, and he laughs at me and my desperation, but I can also discern he’s a little gratified and forgets his anger, and I am down on my knees on the floor again, frantically resurrecting his excitement, hands on his hips, my arms resting on his powerful thighs, crying tears when I try too hard and he hits the back of my throat, but not relenting because I don’t want him to leave me, to make me just like any of the others, having no one looking after me, giving a damn about what happens.

I’m clumsy and inhale at the moment of his release sending me into a coughing fit as soon as he’s out of my mouth, come escaping down my lip and chin, dilettante through and through despite my best efforts. But he’s in good spirits after the third orgasm and wipes it off my face himself, wondering aloud when my beard would decide to start growing, remarking that it’s probably the meager rations that were keeping all the inmates’ puberty slow, always thinking himself clever for studying us, but I don’t resent it—he can study me all he wants as long as I retain my place with him.

***

_April, 1945_

“Look at me,” Kuester commands, but Isidor’s eyes are averted until he receives a light slap. 

“Look at me when I tell you to,” Kuester repeats. “You’re leaving tomorrow. Are you listening?”

“Yes.” Isidor chokes a sob.

“It’s a death march. They’ll shoot you without thinking twice if you don’t keep marching. They haven’t decided where you’ll be headed yet, at least they haven’t told me, but wherever it is, make sure you get there, understand?”

“Will you find me there?”

“They’ll record numbers coming through.”

“What’s going to happen here?”

“I don’t know.” Kuester lights a cigar. He has rarely smoked, maybe once before in Isidor’s presence. “It’s none of your concern.”

“What will happen if the Allies get here?”

“What will happen. We’ll surrender the camp like the others have gone. They might not arrive here, we still have troops out in front of us.”

“But what if they get here, what will happen to everything?”

“Dachau will surrender. I’ll be their prisoner for a while until the war is over.”

Isidor wants to ask so many questions, but he’s not getting any satisfying answers as it is. Liberation is unnervingly close by now—Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Warsaw… He’s happy about it when he’s discussing it with barrack mates, but objectively things are bad—the camp is overflowing with people transferred from the evacuated camps, everything is falling apart, and everyone is afraid of a last minute mass-extermination, and now he’s being sent on this march, so are they planning to mass-exterminate? Kuester looks terrible, worn, sleep-deprived. Isidor doesn’t get much food at all anymore when he visits, and the lovemaking is hurried and distracted—mild stress relief for Kuester more than anything else. They’ve stopped shaving the prisoners, stopped feeding them too. Isidor’s hair is centimeters long, and his figure is shrinking again.

Just one question, because it hardly warrants an answer.

“What if I never see you again?”

“Be happy with your situation, then. Adapt.”

Excitement and incredible sadness make uncomfortable bedmates in Isidor’s soul, resolved in tears about nothing in particular.

Kuester flips through pages of numbers and names. “Anybody in the camp you’ve befriended?”

Isidor recalls people he made connections with, most of whom seem ephemeral ghosts in retrospect, nearly all of them going on to other camps after a few months’ stay. “Gerhard…” he says. “Ahrenberg, I think.” A lively person, arrived more than half a year prior, and only a year older than Isidor. He relentlessly organized secret celebrations of Jewish holidays in the barracks, befriended everyone, reached out to Isidor himself—he’s everything Isidor wishes he could have been.

“Anyone else?”

Isidor names a few others hesitantly. It’s shameful to admit how few connections he has to his peers.

“Good.” Kuester marks their names off for something.

“Are they on the march?”

“No, they are off of it.”

Isidor exclaims protest, seeking an explanation, but is only made to understand that he isn’t to talk to anyone on the march, let alone befriend people.

“Now go back and get some sleep,” Kuester orders without his usual conviction. Unshaven, far more unkempt than usual, it’s as if his authority is sloughing off as he speaks.

“What if this is the last time I see you?” Isidor repeats, wretched. “Aren’t we going to…”

Kuester shakes his head, avoiding eye contact, forcing a yawn. Isidor stands silent for a moment, then proceeds to undress.

“You need to walk tomorrow. Put your clothes back on and get some sleep. I don’t know how much they’ll allow you once you start.”

Isidor is not discouraged. Perhaps he is older, more familiar, or perhaps it’s Kuester who has lost some of his clout, but Isidor comes around the desk, and when he sees Kuester does not protest, straddles him.

“Ich liebe Sie.” Isidor repeats that silly awkward phrase, confidently now, over and over, though only whispering. Kuester’s hand alight on his back, and runs up and down protruding vertebrae, all the while kissing Isidor’s upper body greedily several times but stopping at that.

“If I’m in going to be in jail,” Kuester suddenly says, “would you visit me once I was released?”

Isidor leans back trying to read Kuester’s expression. “If you’d like.”

“That’s the most likely outcome, I suspect,” Kuester says, looking off into the distance. “But, you know, you should try to lead a good life. If you’re liberated, move to America or some place far away. Eat, get married, have children. I’ll find you when I can. You’re a pretty boy, you deserve a pretty life.”

Isidor’s eyes are moist, and he doesn’t want Kuester to see it, so he embraces him tightly, bringing his face out of view. “You don’t sound so convincing, talking about marriage.”

“That’s because I’m a bachelor.”

Isidor thinks he hears a hitch in Kuester’s voice, but doesn’t dare lean back and see if Kuester is tearing up. By the time they separate, neither shows trace of much emotion.

***

It feels strange to part like this, words spoken almost in jest, no real intimacy shared this one last time. But perhaps it’s for the best. I may see him again yet. I head back to the barracks, knowing I can’t tell anyone about the plans for tomorrow, wondering if I’ve consigned my few acquaintance-friends to death by naming them. The barracks are horribly overstuffed—more than a thousand people crammed into space for a fourth that many—and it’s hard to get any sleep, but I force myself, waking up only to try to shove off anyone who rolls over onto me.

It’s very early in the morning when a junior SS guard comes in reading off a list of numbers that need to “get their filthy bodies over to the south fence.” I scramble out when I’m called, trying not to step on any of the others. We stand lined up against the wire, instructed that we’ll be shot if we move without orders. More and more people are called out. At least a fourth of the camp is being marched out, though none of them know it yet, and I can’t decide whether I’m happy in the knowledge or not. My shoes are not in the best condition and I begin to worry about what will happen to my feet if I walk continuously. We’re reorganized into a different formation, and people are beginning to guess we’re being evacuated out. It’s here that I suddenly see Kuester, reviewing us, a photographer with him snapping pictures, taking advantage of our dutiful stillness. Kuester stops in front of me and I stare into the lens of the tripod for the first time in my life.

***

The Americans caught up with us only several days later, before we got anywhere, and the junior officers leading us surrendered without a fight. We had hardly slept, and my feet were bloody messes. They set up a medical station on the spot, grinning happy people with full cheeks and concerned eyes whenever they looked at us, talking to each other in English. My feet were treated hastily and then we were going to be transported to a more central location. 

“Dachau. Dachau,” I had to repeat to make sure that was where I returned. Most people rode back in the backs of the American army jeeps, crowded but we are more than used to it by this point.

Dachau was a hated home—we return to find it still recognizable but mutilated. The gate is open, the American have scrawled English messages on certain parts, probably warning against trespass. As I walk over to the medical tent to be treated, I see a row of SS officer bodies lying face down, shot through the head. Even walking slowly as I am with my injured feet, I don’t have enough time to try to recognize him, people behind me, always en masse, liberated or not. They lead me in, and give me a little cot. The nurse that takes off the sloppy bandages I got out on the fields has large breasts. A well-fed woman is a sight I haven’t seen in so long that it’s unnerving, because I feel younger again, as if she were my mother before the War.

She dresses my wounds again and gives me penicillin—the only word of hers I understand though she keeps talking to me with her gay, high voice and I even nod because I feel awkward and at fault for not understanding a word when I can tell she’s trying to speak clearly and simply and gesture more than necessary. She undresses me and for a moment I feel terrified that I won’t blush like a normal human being from having been handled so shamelessly before, but I’m relieved to feel my cheeks flush once she begins checking my exposed body. She probably tells me to turn over but I don’t understand her gestures, and she gently pulls me over and a mortal fear strikes me that she’ll know, she’ll know everything, she must have already noticed that I was better fed than the others. But she doesn’t check as intimately as I’m afraid she will, and gives me a hospital outfit, which isn’t better than the camp outfit at all, it’s probably worse, but I put it on because she’s smiling so amiably.

She leaves and someone calls my name from across the large tent. I sit up to see Gerhard. He looks around to make sure he’s not watched and climbs out of his cot to steal over to me. He tells me what the last days were like, how no one was fed for a week and people were afraid to drink water from the basins because of the typhus that had been spreading. And now I wonder whether Kuester sent me away on the march not to try to reacquire me later but just to remove me from the chaos here. I ask, as disinterestedly as possible, what had been done to the officers, and he assures me that they were almost all shot on the spot, the Americans outraged at all the sights they encountered when they entered. Brandt was taken away for a big trial, as far as he knows, and I sit digesting the news, trying to decide what I should feel, even as Gerhard continues talking excitedly about going to Palestine, a whole group of us, some complicated plan to get past British restrictions, and I can’t even pay attention because unlike him I am base, and yes, I do, I do miss Him, and now I have nobody at all, and I know I can’t lament about it, because there are so many others in the same position.

Not quite the same, I decide later, when I stand in a group of people listening to one of the inmates reading off names of people confirmed as liberated from this camp, then going on to other camps, people all standing cautiously hopeful, occasionally a loud ecstatic yell when someone hears a familiar name, and I don’t even know why I’m standing in the crowd when I know my whole family is dead and nobody in their right mind would call SS guard names. The bodies have already been cleared off somewhere, so I resign myself to never having full proof, and dare to feel exceptionally miserable among this crowd even though I’m young, healthy, and have a friend who is arranging an actual future for me while I wander about feeling hopeless.

***

_October, 1947_

Isidor reads the paper, still consulting a dictionary from time to time, only noticing the time when Shoshana tramps in through the door. She takes off her muddy work pants, releases long red hair from under a cap and transforms into a woman again.

“What’s with you, Yitzhak? Home so early?”

“Militia practice ended at 17.00 today,” Isidor says, focusing back on the text.

She mimics his answer, his German accent still amusing her even after months of living together. Isidor refrains from commenting that Hebrew is a painfully condensed, guttural language, letting her have her criticisms. She is the farthest thing from a European girl—not that Isidor has had a chance to be well-acquainted with European girls, but she had been born in Palestine, and it was visible—uninhibited but hard-working where it counted, ever-so-slightly mannish and slutty. She honed in on Isidor as soon as he arrived at the kibbutz, and who was he to refuse her?

“What’s the paper say?” she asks, walking around our one room dwelling doing random cleaning, down to her cotton underpants even though she left the door open.

“This and that about the UN, the British crackdown on arms.”

It’s already autumn, but the heat is unbearable and the two of them lie sweating after the smallest exertion in bed.

“You should go tomorrow,” she suddenly springs on him.

“You know I don’t want to.”

“No, I don’t know. Man’yak. What’s your problem with it? Want to pretend it didn’t happen to you?”

“I just don’t like those things.” Isidor turns away, noting that he usually hates her after sex. “I have nothing in common with any of them, don’t have a tragedy to tell everyone about.”

“You know the tragedy? That your head got fucked up good. Your whole family died, for God’s sake. Go tomorrow, p’sich. I’m dragging you if I have to.”

Shoshana has sex with her psychopath again before going to take a shower. “I bought you a nice shirt to wear tomorrow.”

“Mazal tov,” Isidor mutters burying his face in the pillow, asleep by the time she returns to bed.

***

“Did you shave or did you just stand in that bathroom and pretend to?”

They had to walk from the kibbutz along the dusty road, and now she kept trying to fix his appearance, tweaking his starched shirt sleeve, rubbing something out on his face with spit.

“Stop already.” Isidor leans away from her hand. She’s wearing heels that have pained her on the walk, and now she’s both cross and officious and Isidor is glad he’s head and shoulders taller than her even now, so he can ignore her when she gets to be too much.

***

I stand, dressed up, in reverence to… what? Myself? The dead? The dead whose corpses I shoveled into long ditches? Now that I’ve helped Nazis kill other people, I stand silent, looking down like everyone else, waiting for my turn to say my dead family’s names, though I don’t even know their Hebrew names, and Shoshana is standing next to me, dressed so nice she could have fooled me into thinking she was a virtuous, sincere girl if I hadn’t known her all too well by now. She stands petite but always with a presence about her, sturdy elbow locked in mine in premarital sanctity, and I want to vomit.

Another prayer to God. I mumble the Hebrew dutifully and wonder whether Kuester would be happy with me if he could see me now. I don’t miss him anymore, I think three years were enough to fade him away, only very rarely do I spontaneously think of him. I catch myself announcing that I will marry Shoshana in my head. To whom? God? No, Kuester perhaps. He was a monster of a man, they say, but he’s the only one who would care where I spend my life. It’s my turn and I recite the names of father, mother, brother. Of course not his. Everyone says a prayer on my behalf and I go back to my place beside Shoshana, eager to leave already.

Just as I begin to fidget and feel pained with being forced to stand here, I hear the sound of my old name, my real name, and see that unmistakable upbeat countenance of Gerhard Ahrenberg. He comes over and I embrace him with the arm unoccupied by Shoshana and we ask each other how the other’s been doing, how much crop came up, how many rifles have been smuggled into the bunkers—all in Hebrew out of politeness though occasionally slipping back to native German—both avoiding the subject at hand until he produces an envelope for me.

It’s a sepia print inside, a copy of a Nazi photograph, he explains, and he knew he had to give me this one. I stare at the photo, Shoshana jerking my wrist so she could see as well, and beginning to chatter about how I still look like a “scarecrow from the moon”, which is supposed to represent my being thin and disoriented, and Gerhard chuckles politely and assures me that no, I look well. I just keep staring. There was only one photograph ever taken of me at Dachau and I remember vividly now when and how the picture was taken. I haven’t changed as much as I thought—an eighteen year old looking a bit younger because of the big round eyes, but otherwise very recognizable. I just never thought… Never thought I was close enough that I could see it, just a blotch of darker sepia, probably not noticeable to an undiscerning viewer, but I see the splotch and remember the feeling of suction on my neck, of Kuester looking so weary and rundown and taking comfort in still having me, the boy who loved him, and even admitted to loving him and my hand shakes a bit and I don’t feel well, apparently visibly enough that both Gerhard and Shoshana ask what’s with me. 

What’s with me, indeed. I laugh, but it’s hollow, shrug, and burst into tears very suddenly, surprised at myself, because everything suddenly seems incredibly sad, this whole ceremony, so many people dead, and I couldn’t even bring myself to care, and I don’t know why this photo did me in.

Shoshana shakes her head, repeating p’sich, one of her favorite words I suspect, to Gerhard, referring to me. Gerhard smiles and pats me on the back, wiping off a salty droplet that landed on the photograph in my hand. He tells me to visit him more often. The service has ended, he turns to leave.

“Come to our wedding,” I blurt out. Gerhard grins, grips my hand in a hearty shake, promises to come, Shoshana is squealing something, and I put the envelope in my pant pocket.

We arrive home when it’s already getting dark and Shoshana keeps pressing me to admit that I’m glad I went, but I don’t know if I am. I slump down on the bed face down, exhausted from nothing in particular, and she’s still happy about my announcement but concerned, repeating my name in front of every sentence, Yitzhak this, Yitzhak that, and I am trying to listen but feel myself drifting off to sleep when she suddenly climbs on the bed, and lies down on top of me, tapping my nose with her finger inquiring what’s wrong, am I ill?, her crotch pressing into my rear, and for a moment, just a moment, I remember the scratchy couch chafing against my body, and his body against mine. She kisses me on the cheek I’ve turned upwards. 

“Yitzhak, you sure you’re not sick?”

As if in answer, my sexual appetite awakens after an entire chaste day, and we fuck well into the night. The sadness and emptiness lifts temporarily, cast off along with the photograph in the pocket of pants lying crumpled on the floor.


	3. 1953

_1953, Ezeiza Airport, Buenos Aires_

I change in the airport bathroom stall, trying not to let the hems of my one good suit of clothes touch the wet, filthy floor. Why am I dressing up like this? It's not as if my regular workclothes are any worse than that ill-fitting uniform in Dachau, and that's how he always saw me. I'm changed by the time I realize there's something else I need to do. Four days of flying and sitting in airports in Budapest, Rome, Madrid, New York, Rio de Janeiro-- I was too tired to leave their airports and see the cities... not eating much of anything, because everything seems disgusting in transit, and because I'm so used to working all day, and now I just sit and sit and sit... It sickened me and made me restless, and God knows my bowels haven't moved since I left Israel, and it revolts me that this matters, but there's no denying that it does. I'm nervous as all hell as it is-- I don't want to worry about this. He'll want to fuck. I know he'll want to fuck. He knows that I know that he'll want to fuck. I sit, and strain, and then imagine Kuester fucking me, and my whole body convulses with a frisson of fear? revulsion? I couldn't fly back home even if I wanted to... I didn't borrow enough money from the kibbutz for that, counting on finding him, counting on him paying my way back. How did I plan this? How did I envision this as a good idea? I wipe myself as thoroughly as possible, wash my hands in the sink, shave my face by the dim light. Last time I worried so much about my appearance was in Dachau. There it was life and death. And now?

***

They meet at the appointed time, at the appointed club, recognize each other instantly, though neither expected to. Eight years isn't as long as it used to be-- the three years in Dachau seemed endless but after that everything began to blur together. Neither can say anything, not shake hands, not even nod acknowledgment or lessen the distance between them. Kuester finally takes a chair at a small round table, motioning an invitation. Isidor slips into the seat across, body language shackled by apprehension.

"Isidor Schtern." Kuester finally pronounces the name, slowly, enjoying it when the subject so named is sitting right in front of him. "You came, after all."

"I came," Isidor echoes, voice brittle with the obvious.

Kuester orders martinis when the waitress comes by to break up the awkward silence, even smiles at her as he speaks Spanish, fluent but rough-sounding with the German accent. The smile fades into a crueler, more wistful shape when he turns back to his guest. They remain silent until the drinks are brought back. Kuester downs a good portion of it all at once, and as his eyes start to show a gloss, he opens up conversation again.

"How's your health?"

"Can't complain," Isidor says, eyes pointed anywhere but at Kuester, fiddling around with the martini glass in front of him, but not drinking.

"Life in the Promised Land agreeing with you?"

Isidor shrugs.

"Your enthusiasm is contagious, you know. So are there still mules on the streets?"

"There are no streets. I live in one of those cooperative settlements."

Kuester smiles. "Kibbutz?"

"Yes!" Isidor is surprised for the first time, it seems, and finally turns to face the man interrogating him.

"It's no state secret, you know. I read about Israel in the papers from time to time. It's more of a mythical place to me, of course. The land where my little Jew-whore escaped to. It was too risky to try looking you up shortly after the war, but now everything's dying down. Everyone moves on, no vehemence seems to last, for either side. And those planes open for passengers make the trip far shorter, don't they?"

Isidor's lips purse, but he says nothing. No volunteering of information, Kuester must extract it like ore, though it's only alcohol that makes it possible for him to plow onwards.

"So why a kibbutz?"

"What else should I have done at nineteen? I had no skills. They take in anyone."

"I remember some skills you had at nineteen. Some warm, delicious, cocksucking skills."

Isidor's eyes retreat from Kuester's, but there's nothing to be said.

"There were Brits around at first, weren't there? You could have made a nice living doing just that."

Kuester notices the slightest twitch in Isidor's neck tendons that he's come to know so well. 

"See?" Kuester pats his hand against Isidor's shoulder, trying not to dwell on the thought that it's the first time they've touched since 1945. April 25th. 2300 hours. "Germans and Jews already reunite-- in our contempt for the British, at least."

He orders another drink, the waitress staring at Isidor and his full glass, but Kuester doesn't mind. Understandable-- Isidor is still remarkably pretty, despite the unmistakable, dismal Jewishness in his features. She can stare all she wants.

"So what is it that you do, now that you've acquired so-called skills?"

"I haven't. I don't specialize. Mostly it's farm work... a lot of miscellany. And night watch sometimes. And then I go to the army for two months every year."

"Isidor Schtern in the army." Kuester laughs. "Do the rest of them look as downtrodden and haggard as you? An army of the world's misfits, that must be a sight to see."

Isidor shrugs, tense. "Not all of them came from Europe."

"Still, a Jew with a rifle is a ridiculous thought, don't you think? Did you kill anyone?"

"Five during the war in '48. One during night watch two summers ago."

Kuester laughs. "Perhaps we should have set up the lot of you to fight off the Allies for us."

Isidor is not talking, not laughing, not huffing in anger, not reacting. He's little better than the flat photograph of him Kuester still has, in a box under the floorboards, along with some Nazi paraphernalia. Part of Kuester wishes he could preserve Isidor as he is now, forever, instead of letting him go back to toiling under an unforgiving desert sun, fighting Arabs for a scrap of inhospitable land on the other side of the world.

"So did you marry?"

Isidor nods.

"Interesting. You're still bachelor-thin. Doesn't she cook for you?"

"We eat at the canteen," Isidor says quietly.

"Did she give you children, at least? Or does the kibbutz regulate that for you too?"

"I have two. Boy and a girl." Isidor's speech is rigid, but it's to the point, and Kuester relishes that after spending so many years among slovenly Argentinian civilians, who break from work at any opportunity and take five minutes of desultory speech to answer the simplest question.

"Is she beautiful, your wife?"

"I guess so."

"Beautiful by European standards? Or have you gone for some dark Near East woman?"

"She's not dark. She has red hair."

Kuester watches Isidor until the silence finally forces him to meet gazes again. 

"I don't know what's beautiful by European standards anyway," Isidor says, uncomfortable now that the conversation seems to have trailed off again.

"How often do you fuck her?"

Isidor colors, glancing around though Kuester's last question was low enough, throaty enough to be heard only over the small round table separating them.

"Once, twice a day. I don't know," Isidor answers, reluctant, but Kuester knows it's a truthful answer because he has already determined that Isidor sees him as savior, owner, and thus entitled to everything. Even eight years of freedom somehow didn't erase that.

"Jews." The word lends itself so well to scoffing exhalation. "It's offputting how highly sexed you are."

"I was started at an early age. Didn't you have me over almost every night?"

Cynicism? Perhaps Isidor has changed more than Kuester thinks. Far more offputting than his sexual habits, which could be construed as charming, after all. Kuester will ignore it for now.

"And only two children, with that verminous frequency?"

"We... didn't plan to have either. I hardly see them, anyway. They're being raised with all the others their own age."

One corner of Kuester's mouth tilts upward. "You don't have the look of a father about you, it's true. None of that world-weariness and responsibility written into lines on your face. Sounds like they regiment your life for you very well-- from Dachau to kibbutz, they never allowed you a chance at adulthood, have they."

Kuester drinks from his martini, watching Isidor peruse the table's surface, rubbing the stem of his martini glass between thumb and index finger, still not having taken a sip.

"To be honest, Schtern, I invited you here to fuck, recall the good old days perhaps. But I don't think I could touch you now. A husband, a father of two-- there's no bringing back the past, I suppose."

Isidor shrugs, his face obviously more distressed than he would like it to be. 

Kuester had dreaded not being able to recognize his former lover. He didn’t trust him with his address either, oddly enough. The world had turned, after all, and why wouldn’t this boy he had half-raised likewise turn out quite different as a man? The likeness is remarkable, however. The face is practically the same as it had been, jawline perhaps a tad more masculine but still spectacularly defined. Even the body, stylishly dressed and thickened with flesh, is not entirely alien, and the demeanor is at least superficially similar. Kuester realizes full-well that some of this is likely illusion. Perhaps he has simply begun to forget the Isidor of the War and this older, foreign version is supplanting the dated images. And yet there's absolutely no mistaking that nervous swallow, that keen gaze, as though the brain behind those eyes houses some great, profound thoughts, that pathetically Jewish, tense, guarded way his arms wrap around the small parcel he traveled with. Is he returning home so soon, not to bring changes of clothes? Kuester dares not ask, but it's as if the urgency in the thought arouses him.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Kuester says after finishing off his drink. “Let’s go to the men’s room.”

Isidor blinks, doesn’t answer, doesn’t even shift facial expressions, legs simply lifting his body out of the seat. It’s astounding, this obedience, not stupid or animal but knowing, full of understanding in those large, trusting eyes. Not naively trusting, but full of the weary, resigned sort of trust that comes through years of having lived together through harsh times.

Kuester follows Isidor into one of the stalls. The tile floor is filthy, the walls are pissed on down near the floor, scribbled with obscene Spanish humor further up. Further up is where Isidor’s hands plant themselves as soon as he has undone his pants and slipped them down below his knees. The hands are more veiny than Kuester remembers. Time has indeed passed. Kuester slips two fingers into Isidor’s mouth, and Isidor sucks at them desperately, afraid of being out of practice, so enthusiastically desperate that a string of saliva follows Kuester’s fingers as they leave, severing in a wet snap across his chin. Isidor wipes his face against his shoulder because somehow it seems against orders to remove his hands from the wall, for any purpose. Kuester lifts up the hem of Isidor’s silk white shirt, opening his body up with two wetted, insistent fingers, marveling at just how real it feels to finally do something only reenacted in thoughts before going to sleep for so many years. He pulls Isidor's shirt up even further, tracing the curve of his spine with his tongue. What used to look like the spokes of a wheel wrapped in skin is now a furrow between developed back muscles. Perhaps this rangy Jew could wield a rifle after all.

“Been with any men since you left the camp?” Kuester whispers, fingers teasing further in.

Isidor’s body arches, then shudders. “N-no.”

“Good. You shouldn’t. Only interferes with family life and all that.” 

Kuester is still incredulous that he has Isidor back, for however short a visit. Unbelievable how distance and time can become inconsequential as long as the other is alive. How close Isidor had come to death on several occasions, how narrowly he himself had escaped just as the Allied fronts met, and how close they are now, Isidor’s body squirming from discomfort at the closeness, and Kuester relishes it. It’s as if he’s been rewarded for his efforts to orchestrate their survival and meeting, like divine justice abandoning her blind stern façade and smiling for once. Isidor’s body acts like it’s recalling a distant memory, contracting with palpable distress, ever the victim, whether it’s the squalid office in Dachau or an obscure nightclub in Buenos Aires. It’s hot in this closed room, the live music from the other side of the wall muffled but drum beats throbbing through the floor. Kuester grabs Isidor across the chest, rubbing the sweat off his brow into Isidor’s silk shirt, his fingers pumping more quickly, waiting for Isidor to surrender the struggle already and gape open for him.

***

That’s my good shirt he’s dirtying. The shirt I don’t even own, strictly speaking, since everything presumably belongs to the kibbutz, and this was bought with kibbutz money. That’s my good, clean body—that I’ve kept tight and faithful for him all these years without even the satisfaction of knowing that he was still alive—that he’s leaning over a dirty toilet in some no-name club and finger-fucking so hard, as if he thinks I’m still used to it, as if nothing has changed since he last saw me, as if just because I came to see him again I’ve erased all the self-respect and self-sufficiency I so slowly worked to gain.

“How I missed having you…” he has the nerve to rasp in my ear, and I bet he’s not aware that his two thick knuckles feel like they’re goddamn ripping something in me. 

I don’t want to turn around and find out if it’s his German emotions, whatever those are, making him go hoarse, or just a dehydrated mouth, parched by all those dry martinis he gulped down to avoid making proper conversation just before.

“How I missed having a good fuck after dinner each night…”

I don’t want to listen to him cooing his insults—even if he thinks it’s all sentimental good fun. But I don’t say a thing. Automatically quiet and conforming like before, even though I’m not my spindly teenage self anymore, just seeing him makes my soul shrink inside me. A debt for a life can never be repaid, no matter how hateful the creditor. Did I really expect something different from this? Do I hate him, and can I hate him for this? My body is less accepting than my mind and is trying to keep him out, but I can't pretend to hate this as entirely as I'd like. Nobody forced me to send myself plummeting into this absurd vacation, thirsty for unconditional love, love from someone I wouldn’t exist without. Like a parent?

“I want to fuck you so many times while you’re here, Schtern. Your head will spin.”

No, not a parent, by any stretch of the imagination. He begins entering—I’d forgotten how much it hurts, or maybe my body was weak and less resistant in those days. I would never have pushed him away back then—it would have been unthinkable-- even if he wouldn’t put a bullet in my head for it, the thought wouldn't have even entered my mind. But now I just can’t stand it…

***

Isidor suddenly pushes Kuester’s body away.

“I can’t.”

“Can’t?” Kuester’s first word is a pant, already hell-bent on finishing. His head clears quickly, however, composed in a few heartbeats, while Isidor stands dumb, still reeling. “All right. Can’t. It’s a new world order, after all. If you say you can’t, I’ll have to believe you.”

Kuester leaves the stall and washes his hands in the sink fiercely, his revulsion with Jewish dreck so much keener without the fog of sexual satisfaction. His hand trembles ever so slightly as he reaches for a cigarette and strikes up a naphtha lighter, the shadow of Isidor's body from it shaking erratically on the wall. Isidor's body shakes too, as he pulls his pants back up, his brief spike of determination leaching quickly.

“I- I don’t mean I can’t at all. Just not here.”

“Where then.”

“A bed?”

Kuester laughs without mirth, smoke surging out of his mouth, frustrated arousal only smouldering now. “A bed it is.”

They walk out, Kuester calls a cab, and instructs the driver to head to the outskirts of the city. Isidor’s clothing looks rumpled, and that’s annoying, but Kuester rubs his thigh anyway, amused with watching Isidor’s erection rise and fall on cue. Far more robust than he was as a teenager. Twenty seven... twenty seven! Kuester was not much older when he first noticed poor provocative Isidor, naked, standing in line to be deloused, bony hands trying to cover a sunken in crotch.

“I forget how thin you were, sometimes,” Kuester says, hand finally delving into Isidor’s pants. “It’s only when I saw you naked now that I really remembered.”

“Disappointed?” Isidor asks quietly, but with irritation, looking out the window. 

How can he sound so jaded, even as his cock is shamelessly straining to be touched? Kuester’s hand eschews it, teasing at the top of the thigh.

“You’re pathetic enough for my tastes, even without being half-starved.”

Isidor stares out of the window of the cab, feeble attempts at crossing his legs thwarted by his fellow passenger, finally resigning himself to whatever ministrations Kuester chooses to think up. Kuester begins stroking him in earnest, and Isidor breaks out in a sweat, but doesn’t even look over.

“Oh, your little wife must adore you. Easy to raise, slow to finish. Did she have a hand in training you to be like this? Does she lord it over you in bed?”

Isidor doesn’t answer, and Kuester brings him to completion in the cab, a humiliating release, ruining his good pair of pants, unable to moan because the cab driver’s eyes look in the rearview mirror at every sound from his passengers, though he cannot keep his legs from jumping in jerks several times after the fact. Kuester strokes his dirtied hand across Isidor’s stone-still face, thumb inadvertently distorting the exquisitely shaped mouth as it strokes past the lips, only to have the flesh spring back when released.

“Jewish seed. We thought it would no longer exist by this time, back when we were efficient and optimistic. All over my hand, see? What do they say we killed? Hm? How many does your plucky little country accuse us of killing?”

“I don’t know.” Isidor’s gaze is firmly out the window, sweat still rolling down his back. “Six million, they say.”

“Do you think there are as many teeming here on my hand?”

“I don’t know.” Isidor glances at the rearview mirror, to see the driver’s two brown eyes firmly fixed on him. He wonders if it smells recognizably of sex in the car.

“Still a child,” Kuester says, continuing to run his hand up and down Isidor’s thigh. “Living in camps your whole life, from what I gather. Because that’s what that kibbutz is, is it not? They regiment your life for you better than we did. And that’s what happens with obedience—dulls the faculties, encourages infantilism. Even the scheming Jewish brain needs more stimulation to thrive.”

Isidor’s face colors ever so slightly. “I did well in school until we had to move to the ghetto. I had to learn a new language when I was nineteen.”

“Certainly, certainly,” Kuester says, sneering in a way that belies his words. “But I never bothered about your intellect, when I should have. Selfish of me. Then again, I was sure you’d die.” 

There is silence in the car. Isidor wonders if the driver can understand any German. Kuester contemplates Isidor, six years of rabidly active marriage, two children, but here without that context, still pristine, still easily frightened and disoriented, still instinctively drawn to being cared for. Neediness is a quality in a woman that repels Kuester, but here, housed in this pitiable Jew, it’s nostalgic and enticing.

“Yes, I fucked you for three years, all the while thinking you’d die soon, one way or another. Somewhat tragic, spewing my life force into you, corpse-like and wretched. But look at what a healthy little Jewish slut I raised without noticing.” 

“You notice everything,” Isidor says, terse, irritated.

Kuester laughs. The mirthless laughter again. Isidor may carry around that unfortunate suffering air with him, but Kuester is in exile and the pain of it permeates everything for him as well. 

The laugh was a discharge of something in the air. Kuester’s tone changes. “Your survival was my only consolation for how badly everything went, did you know?”

His hand runs up Isidor’s body, feeling him up under his poor, abused buttoned silk shirt, and Isidor feels a warmth not quite as repugnant as the arousal he had felt before, resignation to Kuester’s touch like the pleasant resignation to sleep.

“I’m going to fuck you whether you ‘can’ or not, once we’re home,” Kuester whispers in Isidor’s ear, not because he suspects the driver knows enough German to understand but because he enjoys watching Isidor struggle to act impassive.

***

“Fine by me,” I answer as evenly as I can, and he laughs, probably at my apathy, as if I’m expected to be something more than apathetic just because I came half way across the globe to see him. Him, this man who laments not giving me more education, when he blew other inmates’ brains out on a regular basis. He makes me nauseous—I remember tolerating him so much better when my life depended on it, but now I suddenly find myself agreeing with the people I shunned in Israel. Monstrous, it’s all so monstrous. Why was I spared? And now that I’m spared, why was I drawn to him enough to break routine, to go begging the kibbutz heads for money, just to end up here, fondled by the man who let me survive because I was his whore, because I would listen to his view of things, and believe it! Sympathize with it! 

Why did I ever come here? Stupid and reckless. First there was that cryptic note that arrived in the mail to call a Great Britain telephone number, and he encrypted it by referencing those hated numerals I used to have sewn into my uniform patch. I knew it was him, alive, and at that moment I felt intense joy from surprise, and then intense love, as if I had ever really loved him directly and not through the cloak of food and temporary safety that he provided me. He still remembered my inmate number, and that was enough to signify some deep connection that none of my then-acquaintances could ever have with me, not wife, not friends, not those fellow survivors who invariably make me nervous by thinking I’m one of them when I had cheated, horrendously cheated my way through.

I called the number, and someone answered in German in heavy Swiss dialect -- thank God it wasn’t English, thank God I didn’t have to use the dictionary I borrowed from the depressingly sparse book-room in our kibbutz-- and I answered quietly because I was using the nearest public phone, which was inside the post office in the nearest town, which had involved a five kilometer trek on a dusty road and many stares. Honest people do not have to call anyone. 

I stuck the little Yiddish I know into my speech so that the old woman behind the counter would relax and go back to her work, eavesdropping only to hear a young man call his German auntie in America or whatever it was that would put her mind at ease. The man I spoke to was also using peculiar, roundabout phrases but promised to connect me to someone, and I heard ringing and a call on another phone, receivers brought together, which made the sound quality horribly muffled, but I still heard him, heard his voice, heard him crackle “Isidor?” over the radio-based long-distance, the name already fading from disuse suddenly brought back to life as a spark across a transatlantic wire, and I answered “Yes! Yes, it’s me!” and the old woman picked her head up again to stare, so I toned it down, gripping the receiver, listening to how much he would like to see me, how I should take a flight to Buenos Aires, not to worry about fare because he had money and would pay me back for my troubles, all the while being very circumspect not to mention anything suspicious, knowing he was calling into Israel, into a phone that may well be tapped. Three precious minutes of airtime is all they give you across the Atlantic, but it was enough to make me feel dizzy for the rest of the day, going about my tasks without concentration, thinking only of that voice on the other side, in Argentina, far but not nearly as out of reach as I thought he was only a day ago. Maybe if I had talked to him longer I would have realized this was no place for me to visit? But it was like falling in love anew, no reasoning, and now that I’m irretrievably here I’m regretting that I came.

Why I needed a two week vacation to Buenos Aires was hard enough to explain to the kibbutz heads, but then they questioned me about where I would get the money for such an enterprise and I had to ask them for it, promising to pay it back with interest later, all but begging them. They agreed only just this once, because they felt sorry for me. Everyone feels sorry for survivors, without delving into the lurid details of anything. Everyone except Shoshana—she was indignant and kept threatening to disown me if I put us into debt for a plane ticket like that, but I went ahead and did anyway. She didn’t go with me to the Tel Aviv airport as a mark of her displeasure, and we didn’t have sex the night before I had to leave, and I didn’t masturbate out of principle, because I was equally angry with her for making me doubt irrational decisions. The flight itself was an ordeal, so excruciatingly long, and I didn’t want to sit still because that made me prone to wondering what in the world I was doing.

And that’s what I wonder now as well, guessing at what Shoshana might be doing at the moment, wondering if she could ever guess at what I will be doing shortly, not only what but with whom.

She never wanted to know the details of my life in the camps, and good riddance, because I would never tell her, would never tell anyone. I can’t even pronounce the words, not even formulate them in my head fully. This is between him and me, and that’s why no one in Israel will ever fully understand me. No Jews will understand me as completely as does this Jew-hater, Jew-killer, Jew-fucker, Jew-lover, all at once. Jew-lover, yes, because he would not have been interested in me had I not been an inmate, and because his hand feels so sweet rubbing my torso, even as he’s no doubt repulsed by my Jewishness and how I spread it by having children. And I don’t just tolerate, I bask in his attentions, spineless, clinging, though my life doesn't depend on him now—if anything it’s more dangerous to visit him like this. But if Israel has taught me anything, it’s that everything’s excusable for survivors. Everything’s excusable, and yet I want to cry, but not in front of him.

We arrive and I can hear blood pumping in my ears as I follow him up a staircase into an apartment. There's a wooden cabinet in the salon, dishes on display, the smell of its lacquer filling the entire small apartment. A vase of flowers on the table, a tidy kitchen, and a bedroom. Impeccably clean-- it makes me ashamed about our house in the kibbutz—how the bed is hardly ever made, how at least one person’s underwear is perpetually on the floor. And why am I thinking about this now? Anything to avoid thinking about the looming inevitable.

He asks me if I'm hungry, but of course I'm not, when my stomach is in knots, because this is it... I strip, as he instructs, and get on the bed, and then my face is pressed into the bedspread, my ass up in the air, my cock dangling, swinging as he pistons in and out of me, growing heavy and warm despite the pain, which is something I don't recall happening, but ah! there it is again, and I break some sort of code I have with him when I whimper, muffled by the bedspread, and my dangling cock starts jolting to life, hitting my stomach sometimes as my hips get thrust forward by his power, his heavy body, his strong thighs.

I wake up with a start, from a dream about corpses in a pit, Shoshana was there, Kuester too, and I was shitting into the pit for some reason, my ass burning from it, and right there in front of everyone, my face burning with shame, but the dream fades very quickly once I realize I'm lying in bed, and it takes me only seconds to remember why it's not Shoshana but a heavy man's body spooning with me, still inside my ass. Shit, shit, shit... and my thoughts are suddenly in Hebrew for whatever reason, right after a whole evening spent resurrecting German, and I don't like to think in Hebrew about a man, a Nazi of all men, fucking me. No wonder my ass burns, and the rest of me aches from lying immobile all night-- as if sleeping like that will allow him to catch up on years missed.

I pry myself out of his arms, carefully detach myself, and it hurts even more once his body leaves mine. I stumble toward the bathroom, blindly, in the dark, my legs very awkward and I'm glad no one's watching me almost fall over onto the sink. I'm hungry, deathly hungry, actually-- why didn't I eat anything yesterday? All I ate that whole annoying journey were those stale crackers they give out everywhere, and now for some reason with Kuester, I couldn't bring myself to eat anything, because it's as if it's fitting that I'm starving when I see him. The world has changed, but I can look at him and forget the war ever ended, I can look at him and hunger pangs seem so commonplace I hardly notice them.

Why did I come here? Sex? Not really. I have Shoshana. And I realize that I barely remembered what it was like. It hurt less back then, and I also didn't get excited back then. Numb to both the pain and the enjoyment. And that's how I'm beginning to feel now, as my body seems to give up on complaining about the poor treatment it was subjected to all night. My muscles are slowly going limp, I feel light-headed, and thoughts become slow and viscous as I stand here God knows how long contemplating why the hell I dragged myself half across the globe to meet up with this man from a past that I never even tell anyone else about. Dawn light is beginning to come through the window and I stare in the mirror and realize I look terrible-- and not all that different from the photo taken before the death march. The death march that didn't end in death after all, or maybe I've been on a death march ever since. Death does suddenly seem, if not appealing, then at least welcome. Lightness, wispiness, to the point of non-existence, that's what I want, not to feel the weight of rifles, babies, wives, even my own flesh. Indescribable lightness-- so light that I'm dizzy dreaming of it. Maybe that's the reason for my return here-- I wouldn't ever want to die on Israeli soil. It would be sad and disappointing, and Shoshana and the children and my many casual acquaintance-friends would be devastated, and I'd feel that I wasn't doing my part, my duty in building Israel up from a fucking hellhole desert into something livable even for spoiled Europeans, but here, in Argentina, it wouldn't be as painful to them all and guilt wouldn't be a burden for me. In Argentina, I'm invisible and have no purpose and don't count toward anything, except to him. Kuester must have a revolver or something in this apartment of his. When he gets his fill of fucking me, maybe I'll ask him to put a bullet in my head, like I've seen him to do to others. It's a calming thought, clear and soothing somehow, and I'm suddenly impatient for death to be dispensed on me, like he used to dispense food and comfort. 

But first things first-- shaving, shaving is what's proper to do first thing in the morning, and he'll probably want to fuck me at least several days, and probably wants me to try to look half-decent, and I won't deny him that. I find Kuester's razor on the sink and finish my face off with a few sweeps, and then idly, as if without thinking, the blade travels down the side of my head, a wide swathe of hair falling on my naked body and the floor. My sore backside begins to complain again when I acknowledge the tickle of shorn hair on my body, reminding me that yes, I'm still alive for now. I stare in the mirror.

***

"Whatever you're doing in there, Schtern, you'd better hurry up. I need to go to work today."

Kuester is supremely annoyed to have to wait to use his own bathoom, however gratifying it had been to finish inside somebody else the night before. He's embarrassingly out of practice, Kuester thinks, feeling his back tight after thrusting in the prone position, deciding that Isidor was going to do the hard work of moving the next time they fuck.

There's no answer. No sound of running water. Kuester finally opens the door, and the first thing he feels as he steps in is hair under his bare feet. Black hair, Jewish hair, strewn everywhere. Isidor is naked, seated on the edge of the tub, head shorn, gaze vacant.

"If you wanted to do it properly you could have asked me to do it," Kuester says after examining his houseguest and seeing that the job was done far shoddier on the back of his head.

Isidor doesn't answer, doesn't give any indication that he hears, body tense as if he's about to spring to his feet, but no such intentions evident on his placid face.

"Homesick?" Kuester asks, picking up Isidor's chin, but unable to force the gaze to focus on him. "Wifesick, perhaps?"

Isidor slowly thaws back to life, shaking his head feebly.

"What's the matter with you then?"

"I don't know."

"Why shave your head?"

"I don't know."

"Get in the shower."

Isidor blinks.

"Get in the shower. You've smelled of Jew sweat ever since yesterday."

Isidor, however disconnected, recognizes the tone of command and stumbles in. Kuester follows, placing Isidor closer to the hot stream of water, turning him around several times, starting to wash him when he sees Isidor is too blank to do anything. Finally he holds Isidor's back to his own body, Isidor forced to squeeze his eyes shut against water hitting his face. Kuester strokes him and Isidor moans with his mouth closed, but does not resist as Kuester brings him to completion without a word, only the sound of water rushing against their bodies to be heard. Jew come lands on the tiled wall, some of it drips its sticky way down to the metal faucet. Kuester squeezes the last few drops out and cleans Isidor off.

"At least your body still knows what it likes," he says as he turns off the water, wraps Isidor in the largest towel he owns, and corrals him over to the bed. "I need to go to work, but I don't want to leave you here alone if you're not right in the head."

Isidor lies down, wrapping himself into the towel more tightly, covering himself up to the eyes. 

Kuester curses as he starts to fry some eggs, hoping it's not some sort of irreversible breakdown in his houseguest.

The bed dips as Kuester returns and sits down next to Isidor, heavy hand tracing the side of Isidor's body, wide shoulders tapering down to that irresistable compact pelvic girdle, continuing onwards over the thigh and calf. He seemed so much more stable yesterday. Or even during the war.

"Show a sign of life, Schtern. What I liked about you was how you were always determined to live and function, no matter how much we all cut you down." He leans over Isidor's body and kisses a cheekbone on that impassive face, stock-still except for the occasional darting blink of thick, black eyelashes. Kuester kneads Isidor's firm ass, squeezing, finally biting into the flesh, playfully, through the towel. Isidor squirms and makes a small sigh, which is all Kuester could hope for this morning.

"Fuck me, won't you?" Isidor suddenly says, oddly absent for such a barefaced request, still not meeting gazes.

Kuester's breath catches. "I'll be late for work."

"Please." And Isidor opens the towel, spreads his legs, brings his knees to his armpits. His asshole looks red, even a little swollen, and Kuester is suddenly embarrassed to look there, to look anywhere for that matter. This despondent, frantic submission... what is the meaning of it?

***

He presses into me, my legs on his shoulders, and I feel proud that I'm limber enough for that, and that I can take a pounding again, even though it hurts, God it hurts, the bed is shaking, wooden joints squeaking, the omelette he was making burning neglected on the stove, oil sputtering, smoking, my arms are grabbing the headboard, but each thrust is making my whole body slide back further, until my head is almost banging against the wood. His body on mine-- weighing me down, paining me, making it hard to breathe, making my ligaments stretch and hurt-- it all makes me feel exquisitely alive.

He finishes and tries to get up and leave, but I grasp at him, fingers digging into his arms, pleading him to stay at home with me and he caves and calls in about being late.

I eat breakfast with him, the towel around my waist, and it's amazing how everything begins to change once I'm forking food into my mouth. I remember my despair, but it seems distant and surreal-- more distant than Dachau. He's happy with the change in me when he notices, begins reading the newspaper he stepped outside to buy, sometimes stopping to tell me about a certain article, halting as he translates from Spanish to German, and I can't really listen, but feign interest, sipping at my cup of coffee with undue enthusiasm because suddenly living feels good again, and it also feels good to know that he was worried about me, even if it was just because I was going to be an inconvenience, and that he gave me the less-burned parts of the omelette, and I don't even begrudge him my sore body anymore, and the sun is shining through the window, and wonderful food is coursing through me. It's infantile happiness, but that's the best kind. It's the happiness that made surviving so easy.

***

"Are you happy with your life, Schtern?" Kuester suddenly asks.

"Happy?"

"Are you glad you weren't buried in those pits you dug, I'd like to know."

Isidor bites his lip. "Life doesn't have to be happy. The choice is life or nothing, not happiness or grief."

"Are you glad you're alive?"

"Yes," Isidor answers promptly, sensing growing impatience in Kuester's voice.

"Was it worth surviving like you did?"

"I... Yes, why not?" Isidor swallows. "I enjoyed it. I liked being with you, I even learned to like being fucked by you quickly, didn't I? I'm not one of those real survivors. But that's something I could never tell anyone in Israel. Even if I did, they'd pity me, think I was traumatized too much to know that I didn't like it, but I wasn't. I wasn't traumatized."

One tear, then another fall into his plate, but he's forcing a smile.

"No, not at all," Kuester says, raising an eyebrow. 

Isidor focuses all this attentions on his omelette, sniffing back more tears.

"Do you cry to your wife too?" Kuester asks. He's surprised to feel gratified and triumphant, somehow, when Isidor shakes his head vehemently, but still senses a duty to reprehend. "Then don't grace me with it either."

Kuester takes Isidor back into the bathroom and shaves the parts of his scalp that he missed. Isidor cleans the floor, kneeling naked as he sweeps his limp hair into the dustpan. Kuester still has plans to go to work, but is now determined to bring Isidor with him. There's something manic and damaged in him, and Kuester can feel that it will run rampant if he's left alone. Not a survivor-- does he consider himself dead? It's insulting, almost.

"Why didn't you bring more clothes?" Kuester shouts from the bedroom as he rummages through the parcel Isidor travelled with.

Isidor mumbles something about how that's all he owns, embarrassed, apolgetic, as if Kuester can't comprehend the poverty of communal living, as if he hasn't seen him in far worse states, in uniforms smelling of people that died in them, of piss, and disease.

"So when are you planning to return home?"

"I don't know..."

Kuester is gripped by joy. This childish lack of planning is arousing in and of itself. Open-ended, not self-determined. If Kuester could have it his way, he'd keep Isidor for years, right in the head or not.

"I have army duty to return to in May."

A much more pragmatic reply, less exciting, but still-- May is months away. He's liable to grow tired of Jew-fucking by then anyway...

"You'll buy the ticket for me?" Isidor asks, a tremor of sudden fear in his voice.

"Naturally."

Isidor has finished gathering the mass of black hair into one pile, and feels his workclothes thrown on his bare body.

"Put it on, and let's go. I help this old man sell books-- it's a pitiably easy job, but it pays the rent. We have a few texts in German-- you can read them there. I'll give you a hat so you don't look like an escaped convict."

Isidor looks at him, eyes so large and dark when looking up, then slowly rises to obey.


End file.
